After falling past the event horizon — the point of no return — nothing can escape a black hole. While the depths of black holes may forever remain a mystery, astronomers can observe the regions around them. In a paper published September 3 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of researchers reported, for the first time, spotting a clump of matter falling directly into a distant black hole at nearly one-third the speed of light.
The observations, which come from the European Space Agency’s orbiting XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, are of the 40 million-solar-mass supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy PG211+143, about one billion light-years away. PG211+143 is a Seyfert galaxy, meaning it hosts a bright, actively feeding black hole at its center pulling in gas and dust from its surroundings. By spreading the X-ray light received from that material out by wavelength, ...
